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Noob question from someone with little knowledge of email: Doesn't Gmail just move emails which fail DMARC to spam outright? Even though A1 in the op does look more trustworthy, I would have thought Gmail would just disregard it, since a DMARC fail is a big red flag? In that case, I would think B1 looks a lot more trustworthy, since it's not marked as spam. Or is the picture a bit more complex than that?

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No, Dmarc is not a red flag if it’s not setup, most email providers don’t require dmarc to be setup. Many, many emails are sent that do not pass dmarc.

The reason is that if you maintain dmarc records you have to handle spam complaints and bounce reports. So if you’re using a provider like mailgun or ohmysmtp, you still have to set up a receiving smtp server even if you’re only sending outbound mail.

It does _fail_ DMARC.. but the DMARC record for getopty.com tells it to do nothing if it fails.

It's policy is set to "none". You normally do this when you are starting to investigate your DMARC setup and want the stats. This way you can fix things before you up the policy through quarantine and then to reject.

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